PHOTO REPORT: Centralised silage making in the Netherlands

During the harvesting season, dairy farmers in the Netherlands can bring their grass and maize to a centralised place where the fodder is being made into quality silage. Three farmers started this ‘Feed Centre’ a couple of weeks ago in a little Dutch town called Woudenberg. After a few months of conservation, the forage is mixed with the raw materials into a base diet. This way, dairy farmers don’t have to invest in silage storage, a mixer wagon and labour.
Photos courtesy of Ton Kastermans

Photo

Two years ago Roubos Walter, Marco van der Wind and Martin Wolfswinkel (not pictured) heard about a ‘Feed Centre’ in the Dutch province of Friesland and became inspired. However, this particular initiative went bankrupt so the men decided to fill this gap in the market by starting their own ‘Feed Centre’. Currently, they have eight dairy farmers on board who live around six kilometres away and have a total of 550 cows and 250 hectares.

Upon arrival at the ‘Feed Centre’, the tractor with fodder enters the weighbridge to calculate the harvested volume of fodder they bring.

Every farmer has their own entry card, which is scanned when the farmers drives up and down the weighbridge.

The ‘Feed Centre’ has two bunker silos used for grass silage. All tractors entered have a card with a colour lying behind the windows. This makes it easy to see which grass belongs to which farmer. By dividing the grass from all farmers across both bunker silos, two silages of the same volume are being created.

Starting three weeks before harvest, the grass is sampled on a weekly basis to measure the quality of the grass. After placing the silage in the silos, another sample is being taken.

The name of the farmer, the time and place of sampling is written down on the grass sample bags.

The collected grass samples are examined by BLGG AgroXpertus. New samples are being taken during the whole harvesting season, to get a good insight in the course of the quality.

The contractors of the various dairy farmers are working together to fill the bunker silos and pressing the fodder into it.

One person, employed by the ‘Feed Centre’ , is present to place the silage into the bunker silos and to spray a mould inhibitor with lactic acid bacteria onto the silage.

Upon leaving the premises, the tractor with silage wagon enters the weighbridge again. The delivered amount of kilograms is listed on the receipt. At the end of the day, the farmer knows exactly what he delivered. Later the information about quality of the product is listed as well.

Related tags:

2 comments

Hi, It's Manuela from Italy. I work for dinamica generale and we provide solution to manage operations efficiently and control better quality of fresh forages managing their variability.Have you heard about our portable NIR analyzer? It could provide really an added value as you could have predictions in 30 seconds and therefore control better the grass that farmers are bringing before stocking it. For other information have a look at the following link:http://www.dinamicagenerale.com/agrinir_analyzerIf you have questions drop me an e-mail.RegardsManuela